American Appetites (41 page)

Moving a thick forefinger along one of his labyrinthine designs, this one conical, with a series of machicolated projections not unlike that of a terraced garden superimposed upon, say, the interior of a television set, Vaughn said, in a voice both reverent and critical, “This is the means by which one moves from one plane to another.” He glanced toward Ian and emended, wryly, “If, of course, one
can
move from one plane to another.”

AND SHORTLY AFTERWARD
, within twenty-four hours in fact, Ian McCullough and Meika Cassity were lovers.

And for the space of such time as they were together, or times—for adultery, in so public a place as Hazelton-on-Hudson, makes of us, by necessity, as unsentimental as coroners in the art of dissection: “time” becomes an hour this afternoon, two hours on Thursday morning, a miraculous stretch of three, late Saturday afternoons—Ian forgot the tragedy of his life: or nearly.

He told her, How beautiful you are, how beautiful: warmed by her body as a convalescent is warmed by the sun. And she told him, seemed at times to be vowing to him, that she loved him, adored him, had adored him in fact for years. (Meika reminisced about their first meeting, many years ago, which Ian, unhappily, could not remember. No matter, Meika said curtly, kissing him in forgiveness; I remember.) She worshiped his body, she said, embracing him fervently, standing on tiptoes to kiss him and, when they were unclothed and lying in her bed, hugging him passionately about the hips . . . kissing the tip of his penis . . . taking his penis in her mouth . . . as Glynnis had never wished to do. She looked up at him in triumph, a greenish fire flaring in her eyes, and eased her slender snaky so very thin yet strong little body over his, to guide him into her, to draw him inside her, yes, like this, ah exactly like this, I adore you damn you fuck you you ignored me and I did, I always
did
, adore you . . . just like this.

3.

There came, on the first day of testimony, such surprising good news Ian could scarcely, at first, grasp its significance: Fermi Sabri had returned suddenly to Cairo, without having informed Lederer, and would not be testifying for the prosecution.

Thus the man's malicious account of Ian McCullough's “affair” with Sigrid Hunt would not be admitted as evidence; under the statute, no testimony from any witness not physically present at a trial was valid.

Ian asked why this was. “For the obvious reason that the defense doesn't have the opportunity to cross-examine,” Ottinger explained. “This witness was lying, and I would have exposed him to the court.”

“But why do you think he ran off? Do you think—”

“I don't ‘think' at all about him; now that he's out of the picture he doesn't exist for me.”

“But he might know about Sigrid; he might in fact have killed her, and hidden away her body, and—”

Ottinger waved him into silence. In a gesture resembling eerily a characteristic gesture of Meika's, he pressed a forefinger to his lips. Ian stared at him and could not guess what this meant. That Sigrid was not dead; that Ottinger knew of her; or, that, being out of the picture, nothing Fermi Sabri had done was of immediate, pragmatic interest?

Ian did not pursue that subject but asked Ottinger, “If a witness gives valuable testimony to a grand jury and subsequently dies or disappears or is in fact erased by the defendant himself, is his testimony nonetheless invalid in terms of the trial?”

“Certainly,” said Ottinger. “It happens all the time. When you are dealing with professional criminals, I mean. With organized crime.”

THE PROSECUTION WAS
to require four weeks, with numerous interruptions, delays, and adjournments, to present its case, the main argument being of course that the death of Glynnis McCullough was not, as the defense claimed, an accident, but had been committed both “in the heat of the moment” and “with intent”: and for a self-evident motive, to be proved by the testimony of witnesses and evidence.

There came, one by one, like a procession in an old morality play, Mr. Lederer's witnesses: known to the defense beforehand and repeating, with some deviations and embellishments, their grand jury testimonies, but subject now, in court, to rigorous cross-examination by Mr. Ottinger. (The “cross,” as Ottinger referred to it, quite intrigued Ian, who had never before attended a trial. How like a game the process truly was, a game of squash, say, in which the ball, slammed back and forth between the players, was the witness.) Each stepped to the witness stand, and each, with varying degrees of confidence, swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth so help me God. Ian wondered how one could tell the truth if one could not know the truth.

But the “truth” was presented, at least initially, as a sequence of objectively verifiable events. The prosecution's first witnesses took the stand to give factual testimony: one of the paramedics who had been summoned to the McCullough residence on the night of April 23, 1988, by an emergency telephone call of Ian McCullough's, put to the Hazelton Medical Center . . . one of the young police officers who had been summoned by neighbors “to investigate a disturbance” at the McCullough residence . . . the chief physician in the emergency room at the Medical Center, to which both Mrs. McCullough and Dr. McCullough were brought, the one unconscious and requiring immediate neurological testing, the other “inebriated but lucid,” with minor lacerations of the face, arms, and hands . . . even Jackson Dewald, who avoided Ian's eye but would not be led by questioning into claiming that the disturbance at his neighbors' house was “part of a pattern” of similar disturbances.

Each witness in turn was required to formally identify Ian McCullough. “Is the defendant present in this court?” he was asked. “Would you point him out, please?” And Ian, pointed out, duly rose from his seat at the defense table: Yes, I am he. It was a curious ceremony but one, he supposed, he could understand. For what if the wrong Ian McCullough had been apprehended?

And there came, one morning, Dr. Morris Flax, who also avoided Ian's eye and remained resolutely neutral in his testimony, willing to be led by neither Mr. Lederer nor Mr. Ottinger. “The trauma to Mrs. McCullough's head might have been an accident,” Flax said, “though of course it might also have been something else.”

During the neurologist's lengthy, technical testimony, which involved a display of magnified X rays, measuring about two feet by three, for the jury's inspection, Ian began to tremble and worried that he might break down, this episode to be duly reported and headlined in the next day's papers. How quiet the courtroom was, and how reverently everyone, not excluding Judge Harmon, listened to Flax's clipped, cautious voice, the voice of the professional dealer in tragedy, as he described the numerous injuries to Glynnis McCullough's skull; showed, with a pointer, the shadowy brain areas, the fractures in the bone, the blood clot that was removed by emergency surgery from the upper left side of the cerebral cortex. Suppose the patient had lived, Lederer asked, in a dramatically lowered voice, would she have had a full recovery, or would there have been permanent brain damage?

Dr. Flax hesitated for the first time and for the first time allowed a flicker of an expression to pass over his face, a look of regret, annoyance, disdain. “I really cannot say. But I would guess, if forced to do so, that the patient might have sustained some brain damage, and a partial paralysis.”

Ian shut his eyes quickly. He had not known this, had he? Had Flax told him?

He began to cry; yet so quietly, with such gentlemanly constraint, sitting as always straight and tall, his head high, he did not think anyone noticed. For the jurors, even with their unimpeded view of his face, were staring at Dr. Flax, fully absorbed in the X rays and his terrible teacherly pointer.

There came then, more aggressively, a Dr. Albert Frazier of the State Department of Health, a forensics expert, a Special Command liaison officer between police and district prosecutors in the state, who testified, and would scarcely be budged by cross-examination, that in his opinion the trauma to the skull and to the brain of the victim—for “victim” was Dr. Frazier's conspicuous term, and not “patient”—could not have been an accident. Again the X rays were exhibited, and again the pointer brought into play. Again the fractures in the bone, the injuries to the brain, the hemorrhaging, the blood clot, the subsequent hemorrhaging, the death. Bruises on Mrs. McCullough's shoulders suggested, Dr. Frazier said, that she had been seized and pushed backward with a good deal of force; had she merely stumbled backward and fallen against the window, her own weight would probably not have been sufficient to account for the trauma. And when Ottinger challenged him he simply repeated what he had said: in his judgment the trauma could not have been caused by an accident.

“Yet you say that the weight of Mrs. McCullough's body would ‘probably' not have been sufficient to account for the trauma,” Ottinger said. “Which leaves the matter ambiguous, doesn't it?”

“Probability
is
ambiguous,” Frazier said. “It is ‘possible' that the ceiling of this courtroom will collapse on us in the next few minutes, but it is not ‘probable.'”

“It is then ‘possible' that the weight of Mrs. McCullough's body would not have been sufficient to account for the trauma, but is it ‘probable'?”

Frazier said meanly, “It is both.”

Ottinger asked, “But you say categorically that the trauma could not have been caused by an accident. Is this a scientific judgment or just your opinion?”

“Since I am a scientist, it follows that my opinion is scientific.”

In a tone of mild incredulity Ottinger asked, “Can you be absolutely certain, Dr. Frazier? Beyond a shadow of a doubt?”

For the first time the witness hesitated, shifted his shoulders inside his coat, conceded, slowly, “One is never absolutely certain of anything one has not seen with his own eyes, of course. And even then . . .”—he paused so long it seemed he had stopped speaking; then added, as if the words held a mysterious meaning for him—“and, of course, beyond the ‘shadow' of a doubt. . . .”

Ottinger thanked him and stepped away. Ian was beginning to see that in the courtroom, as virtually everywhere, the trick is to behave as if you have won a point; in which case, perhaps, you have.

BUT THE NEXT
item of business was a highly visual and highly dramatic demonstration, staged by the prosecution, to bear out the charge that Glynnis McCullough must have been pushed, and had not simply fallen, into the plate-glass window: the testing of the strength of a sheet of plate glass, identical in size and thickness to the window that had shattered. Much was made by Lederer of the fact that this sheet of glass had been manufactured by the same company that had manufactured the sheet of glass in the McCullough's dining room; it had even been purchased from the same store. A canvas sheet was laid on the courtroom floor and a makeshift shelter set up, to prevent glass from flying out into the courtroom; a faceless mannequin of the approximate size and weight of the deceased was pushed, shoved, thrown against the window, with increasing violence and frustration, until finally the glass cracked: but did not shatter. Ian watched in horror and lifted his hands to shield his eyes. How terrible, how terrible, he thought. He saw again Glynnis's contorted face, the blur of motion that was her body and his, saw again the window careening toward them, and remembered it breaking so easily: as if it had already been broken, in readiness.

Like the magnified X rays, the “window demonstration,” as it would be called in the press, made a powerful impression upon the courtroom; but Ottinger calmly and, it seemed, logically dismantled its underlying argument. He objected that no one in the courtroom, except possibly his client, could speak to the condition of the window that had broken: whether it had been previously cracked, for instance; whether it had been fitted in its frame to the degree to which the glass in the demonstration had been fitted in its frame; and so on and so forth. And it was surely erroneous, and a violation of common sense, to claim that a sheet of glass purchased in March 1988 was identical to a sheet of glass purchased as long ago as 1965, when the McCullough house had been built. . . .

So Nick Ottinger rose to the occasion and, for all Ian knew, might have salvaged it. But the image of the mannequin thrown against the glass, and picked up, and thrown, and again picked up, and again thrown, with increasing force, and the simulation of rage, stayed with him. How terrible. How clearly I too deserve to die.

THERE CAME, IN
their turn, Police Detectives Wentz and Holleran, Ian's old companions, who answered Lederer's questions unhesitatingly and succinctly: there seemed to be no doubt in their minds that a crime had been committed; thus a criminal had committed it, though they did not quite say so in those words. To Ian's embarrassment the lengthy, rambling, inconclusive interview of May 29, taped at Hazelton police headquarters, was played to the court: and seemed, like so much else that both did yet did not represent him, to make a significant impression upon the jurors.

The voices of the several police detectives were distinct but the voice of Ian McCullough was indistinct: indeed, vague, evasive, and toneless.
I don't know
. And:
I don't remember
. As a consequence of Ottinger's presence, Ian had at least managed to say nothing to incriminate himself: that, he knew; yet he squirmed in misery, hearing his voice so lacking in resonance and spirit, a dead man's voice, the voice of a clearly guilty man. How unfair it was! How unjust! A voice on a tape, of necessity bodiless, lacking all the qualifications of the physical self's condition, at that time and in that place: that morning, Ian recalled, of grief, exhaustion, despair.

The tape ran, in its entirety, for over three hours; it was repetitive, circumlocutious, and spaced out by long silences yet exerted a curious spell, even a kind of slowly accumulating tension. For one waited—Ian found himself waiting!—for a break in the accused's demeanor: a sudden admission of guilt, or a declaration of innocence.